[MUSIC] Okay, consider this and I hope this doesn't ever happen to you. But you're getting ready for an upcoming job interview, you practice your questions, you have your outfit planned, and everything's ready to go. You show up early to the interview, and then you wait and you wait. And the recruiter comes out about 15 to 20 minutes late, mispronounces your name. And then during the interview, proceeds to ask you some questions that are not related to the job, and you're a bit confused. But despite all that, you do the best you can, and you send a followup email thanking the recruiter for his time. And then you wait and you wait. And you don't hear whether you got the job or that you didn't get the job, you just hear nothing. Well, unfortunately this does tend to happen to some candidates and it really tends to reflect on the organization as a whole. And that's the focus of this video, how can recruiters be more effective because, the opinion of the recruiter in the recruitment process matters for the applicant. What their impression is of the overall organization. So I don't want to over emphasize recruiter impact because at the end of the day, the applicant really does care about the job and perhaps, the organization more than the recruiter. But nonetheless, it does make a bit of a difference. So, let's take a look. So does the impression that the applicant has of the recruiter, does it make a difference? Well, research does show that it may. Certain characteristics could have an influence on the attitude of the applicant. But it also says that it's the early opinion, meaning it will lead the person, the applicant to perhaps want to seek out more information, and maybe discontinue the process if they actually really don't like that recruiter. So, these early opinions may have not as strong of an effect on whether or not to accept the final job offer. But it could be critical because if you really had a bad experience with a recruiter, you may discontinue your quest to work at that company at all. Yet, another reason that you want to have in diverse workforce, and that is that recruiters who maybe have their race or gender in common with the applicant can have some influence. But it's not necessarily a strong influence, research says. It's really more of the quality of the communication between the candidate and the recruiter, and perhaps other parts of the organization like the overall diversity climate. And perhaps, the overall culture would make more of a difference All right, so then what are some of the characteristics then of effective recruiters? What have we found to be more successful in terms of their personality traits? And that is, they need to be seen as, first of all trustworthy, but also personable and friendly, very affable, and they're typically then regarded more favorably by job applicants, by candidates. It's important that we think about them in our own organizations, who do we have as recruiters? Are they really people-people, are they people who are seen as personable and friendly? So that's critical and it of course, we want them to not just be friendly but they need to be trained in how to conduct effective interviews and using effective listening skills, and all of these different things as well. So training is not just important for recruiters, I'm going to include anyone in this bucket that has any hiring responsibility. Training is critical, so we need to think about the ethical responsibilities of recruiters and we cover that in another lesson. We need to think about how to actually conduct the interviews, so pretty much all of the things that we're talking about related to actually how to conduct interviews and to avoid biases. And these kinds of things need to be communicated to anyone in a hiring capacity within the organization. So what kind of training topics should be covered for people who are interviewing and recruiting people? Well, we need to make sure that these individuals have diversity and sensitivity skill training. Ethical recruiting behaviors as I've talked about before, knowledge of the laws that are pertinent in your particular area of the world. Great communication skills, right? We talked about interpersonal skills, but again, a critical skill is listening, getting back to people on time, and being professional. Thinking about how it's not just a one person show, that recruiters could really benefit from using more of a team based interviewing technique. And then, also just being sure to prepare in advance and have the resume read, and this goes back to professionalism as well.
